post St Patrick's Day...

The St Patrick's Day party was a hit. Why do I know this, here is the evidence we woke up to yesterday:
1. Sticky floors
2. Broken glass
3. Photos of Brian in a fantastic leprechaun outfit
4. Only a few dried up smears of all the green foods we had - spinach dip, guacamole, veggies and dip, wasabi peanuts, etc.
5. Many beer bottles to bring back to the liquor store to get our deposits back
6. Gifts that our guests brought, including various bottles of wine, an orchid, marzipan, a German copy of Waking Ned Devine on DVD, and a CD of a song about Barack Obama being Irish.
7. Dizzy and Sonja, visiting from Hamburg and sleeping in our guest room.

It was a good party. It was even worth all the cleaning up.

The squeaky wheel...

This posting is not, as you may have guessed from the title, about bike maintenance. I could write you several paragraphs on that if you like, but what I mean is closer to the saying 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease.'  Let me explain.

I have either written about our poor customer service incident with Lufthansa or at least referred to it in some snide way in a previous blog post. But since I can't even remember if I mentioned it, you probably can't remember reading about it and so I will give you a quick summary of what happened. In early January we flew back from Cairo and had a layover at Frankfurt airport. The layover was supposed to be four hours before we could take our one hour flight back to Hannover. And since it was still holiday travel season, all earlier flights were booked. Frankfurt airport, however, has something that I haven't experienced for a long time - a Hooters. That's right, after bland food and women covered head to toe in Egypt, we killed a couple of hours watching American football and eating hot wings, served by waitresses in tight t-shirts, shiny nylons and scrunchy socks.  Hooters fashion has not changed since 1986. Anyway, we got to the gate about an hour before our flight to Hannover was supposed to leave. Shortly thereafter, the Lufthansa staff announced that there was a change in the aircraft and they would not be able to take all passengers. They asked for volunteers who would like to move to another flight or take a train. No one got up. A few minutes later, there was an announcement "these passengers are now placed on stand-by..." and they called our names, along with those of about 10 other passengers.

Every couple has roles that they play and in stressful customer service situations it's usually me that does all the talking. So when we went up to the counter to patiently address this issue with our friendly customer service representative, Brian stood off to the side. She explained to me that they have to take a smaller airplane than planned, therefore the flight was overbooked. We could either wait four more hours for a flight or get on the train to Hannover. Lufthansa would be happy to provide us with ten euro meal coupons valid anywhere in the airport. That was it. There were no bonus miles, no free tickets, no upgrades, and no begging or groveling. And why us and not other passengers? Because, friendly representative explains,  it's based on fares - we paid less for our tickets than other passengers and therefore we get bumped. At this point Brian said some words that are not family-friendly and the agent told us that she could have given us any reason but just wanted to be honest with us. Well gosh, thanks. She also said that by law the airline does not have to provide any compensation to its customers if they cannot fly due to a change in equipment.

We ended up taking the train, getting in just a little later than we would have anyway, and getting our bag delivered the next day. Nonetheless, my American customer service standards were offended and I decided to write a complaint letter. Why not? I figured, the worst that can happen is they ignore it. I had almost forgotten about the letter when two weeks ago I received an email from Lufthansa customer service. "Very sorry for the inconvenience... yadda yadda.... you are each eligible for 250 euros in compensation, please send us your bank account information"!!! Not miles, not credit, cash money.

The deposit came through today! We are putting it away for our April trip to Budapest, Bratislava, and Prague. Since have mostly paid for the hotels and tickets already, our complaining money might cover the rest of the trip. I'm not sure how far a euro goes in Budapest (not far, I think. They don't even use euros in Hungary). Forget spring break, in Daytona Beach or Cancun... we are heading for spring break Slovakia!

So I guess in Germany, at least with airlines, complaining works. This squeaking wheel just got greased with 500 euros. Hopefully my next bike tune up is a lot cheaper than that.

Weekends

Apparently people still read my blog (a lot of you did this weekend anyway) so I should write you something new.

The weekend was a quiet one, and we did that on purpose. Last weekend Brian had a teachers' happy hour on Friday (translation, happy 6 or 7 hours) followed by a little enchilada party at our house on Saturday. We didn't intend for it to be a dinner party but we ended up inviting 6 people who all wanted to come. So I made the tortillas and the salsa myself (you can't buy anything that tastes vaguely Mexican and good here), Brian tidied up and rearranged the furniture, people came, ate, drank, produced a lot of dirty dishes, and all of a sudden it was 2am.

This weekend there was no drinking and no socializing. There was only bike riding, rollerblading, baking, homework, reading, and movie watching. Last night we tried out Mass in Spanish. There are no English speaking Masses here and going to the nearby one in German isn't quite as fulfilling as we'd like. Maybe that's 'cause we can't understand what they are saying. Consequently we don't go as often as we used to back home. So we figured that at the Spanish Mass, at least I'd understand everything and Brian wouldn't  understand any less than he does at German Mass. There was a difference - it was a younger crowd, they seemed to know each other well, there was more smiling and shaking hands and hugging. And I knew what the priest was saying too.

Afterward we went out for Indian food - not to the Indian restaurant across the street that you've read about before, but another place. I know, you must think we are such traitors to cheat on our local place. But this restaurant is owned by the parents of one of Brian's 6th grade students. All year they have been telling him to go. Also, the 6th grader said that the restaurant across the street from us sucks. So we decided to try his family's place out. It was a little fancier than what we are used to, and  the food was good, but we won't be regulars there. It's hard to beat the a restaurant that you can see looking down from the living room window.

Next weekend we are hosting a St Patrick's Day party. As far as I know it will be the best (only?) Irish-American St Patrick's Day party in Hannover. A lot of the school staff are coming as well as my few Hannover friends. If we are lucky there might be a couple of real Irish people there, along with some Canadians, Germans, at least one Pole, Americans, Australians, English, and maybe a Danish/Indian guy too. This week I have to try writing a note for all of our neighbors to let them know we are going to have a party and to call us if it's too loud, or just come on over. They probably won't do either, but we should at least try to be polite. Since in class we already  practiced writing notes to our neighbors about letting in the meter reader, I will give it a shot. Then I'll get someone who actually knows German to help me with it.
After the party there will be two days of intense cleaning, then my parents come to visit.

So don't worry, the posts will become a little more exciting as the weather warms up and we do some more traveling. Until then, I'll keep writing about mundane things anyway as long as you keep tuning in.

Welcome to 1983.

I am now the proud owner of .... (drum roll please)

a microwave!

I know it sounds silly. We manage to do all of our banking and bill paying on-line, we juggle various websites to stream the latest movies, we skype, facebook, blog, etc. And we have been living without a microwave for the last 7 months. We also have cheap pre-pay cell phones with no internet or keypads and we have a house phone for the first time in many years. So that's a little more like 2003 than 1983, but it's just another way we've gotten more high tech and more low tech all at the same time here. Our microwave even has a dial, no buttons, and no digital display.

It's not that I was ever anti-microwave, but when we moved here and had to get so many things to settle in to our new place, it was not high on the list. We also had nowhere to put it - I had to buy a little cart to hold the microwave. German kitchens are basically rooms with water and electrical hookups. We managed to buy our fridge and our sink/countertop/oven unit from the previous renters but there are no built in cabinets or shelves or anything.  I'm going to stop with the kitchen description now because I'm starting to bore myself.

So now we can heat up leftovers to our hearts' content. I will let you know if we pull out parachute pants or start listening to cassette tapes again. And if Brian grows out a mullet, that will really be news.

Bike stalking and a hair cut

Spring is here. This is the first time I've lived someplace where March is not a big tease of warm days followed by snowstorms. It's generally close to 50 degrees and my brain has the urge to go to track practice, watch some high school baseball, or take a long bike ride. Since the first two aren't possible right now, I took a bike ride on Tuesday.

 Brian and I are still working on figuring out new routes for long rides. The goal is to find  a couple where we're not stuck at a lot of stoplights getting out of town, and where we don't get run over on the road or stuck on a bumpy sidewalk. So yesterday when a fast cyclist passed me by, I decided to follow him. I tried to stay far enough behind that he didn't notice me or didn't get freaked out that I was behind him. I'm not sure whether I succeeded or not, but I spent about 25 minutes stalking him and trying to learn his route. If you are following someone on a bike, should you talk to him? (I say him because they are almost always guys). Is it more or less creepy if you are following a group rather than one cyclist? These are questions I will have to answer if I continue stalking bike riders around Hannover.

Then I went to get a haircut, and I was nervous. I'd gotten it cut before by a hairdresser who spoke English and was referred to me by my fellow cross-country coach. The good part was that she spoke English. The bad part was that it was expensive and I didn't like the cut. I have big hair. When it's cut blunt across the bottom the underneath part gets curly and it grows out in sort of a triangular shape. That's exactly what was going on. Trying new hair people is stressful, especially since I've been fiercely loyal to the ones who have done a good job in the past. But I'd held out as long as I could this time and now was determined to try somewhere cheaper near home.

The big variable was whether I could say how I wanted my hair in English or not. To be prepared, I found some pictures online and looked up the word for layers (schichten). I knew how to say things like: a little shorter, not all the same, short and long, front and back, etc. So I tried out the place down the street and of course the girl cutting my hair spoke only German. So I got to use my new vocabulary and my visual aids, and.... it turned out pretty well. I think I got lucky. And it was half the price of the other place. My hair is no longer a triangle. It is more like a shaggy oval with plenty of different lengths that can curl and flip as they wish.

So I guess it was a successful day, even if I didn't make a lot of progress on the paper I am trying to write.  Of course as the weather gets warmer, bike stalking will become a lot more appealing than paper writing. Cyclists of Hannover, if you see me behind you, just don't pay any attention. I won't know what to say to you anyway.

I am my own meter reader

I have written about some boring things before: insurance, molasses, (fill in your own snoozer here).
This time I am writing about utilities, and let me warn you it might not be as thrilling as my description of the swimming pool.

But yes, electricity and gas. It should be simple, right? They turn on when you need them, you get a bill for them every month, everyone's happy. I try not to make direct comparisons too often between the US and Germany but this time I just have to. Why do they make it so hard here? Let me explain.

When you live in an apartment building in the US, there is one water heater for the building and all the energy meters are usually together in the basement or outside so that the energy company guy can stop in and read them every once in a while. As a tenant you never really think about it. In German apartments, you have your own water heater. Ours happens to be in our shower. It looks like this:

 In most German apartments I've seen they put it somewhere more discreet. I guess who ever designed ours thought that it would be nice to weave your way around the heater as you get into the shower, or to hit your head on it when you are cleaning the tub.

When we first moved in the water heater was broken a lot. A nice hot shower would turn ice cold as soon as the pilot light cut out. Eventually that got fixed but we still know that you can't shower and wash dishes at the same time. The stranger thing to me is how you pay for utilities.

Instead of billing you for what you've used, the energy company sets a monthly amount for you to pay based on the number of people living with you and the size of your apartment. Every year they compare what you've paid with what you actually used and you either get a refund or have to pay more, depending on how close the payments were to the real cost. Brian and I took this as a challenge and kept our bathroom and kitchen mostly unheated for the winter.We kept the thermostat set so it was cool enough for guests to be uncomfortable and us to wear layers for hanging around the house.

How do they know how much energy you use? Either they come to your place and look at the meter (ours hangs attractively next to the living room doorway), or you tell them. Let's talk about the first option. The energy company posts a notice in the lobby area of the building about a week in advance, saying that they will come to do the readings - always on a weekday and always in the day time. They invite you to give a key to your neighbor if you know you won't be home. So either you take off work, or find someone in the building who has, and invite that person to have access to your place and all of your stuff. This is so common that we just spent an entire chapter in my German textbook writing letters to our fictional neighbors, asking them to let the meter reader in. Maybe neighbors who have lived next to each other for years are ok with this, but we are the weird foreigners on the top floor who don't speak a lot of German and do our laundry too early on the weekends. No one gets our key. Who knows what they'd do with it. Maybe they'd sabotage the washing machine.

It so happened that I missed the meter reader last time, and had not given anyone our key. They didn't seem to mind too much - I just got a postcard in the mail asking me to send in my customer ID number and the numbers that appeared on the meter. The American in me thinks that some people might learn enough about the units of measure for energy that they would lie about their meter reading to save money. But I don't think Germans would do that. It would be against the rules. So, not knowing enough to lie about it, I went online and entered the numbers I read on the meter. If that's all that has to be done, why send meter readers out anyway? A couple of weeks later, we got a letter - we had used about 30 euros less than we'd paid over the 6 months we'd lived in the building. I was a little disappointed, to be honest. Putting on a scarf when I got out of bed had only been worth 30 euros? Of course, we have no concept of what energy costs here, other than that it must cost more than we'd been paying at home.

So what I've learned from the whole experience is that it's a good idea not to heat the kitchen, though I do draw the line at taking cold showers. I've also learned how to write my neighbor a note asking if he/she would take my key and hang out in my apartment, sabotaging my appliances while waiting for the meter reader. If I'm lucky I'll get some money back this time next year.

Meeting Helga

My German has reached the point where there are a lot of words that I understand. I can, believe it or not, even say some of them. But speaking is harder. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say and can think of the words in English and Spanish, but all I can say in German is Ummm... uh... ja. And with 15 students in my German class, I get some practice but not as much as I'd like. Plus if I speak too much with my classmates, I might learn to speak German with a Vietnamese or Russian accent. That would be weird.

In order to keep it up and feel like I am proficient in a foreign language, even if it's not the one they speak in the country where I live, I belong to a Spanish group through the International Women's Association in Hannover. I joined IWAH primarily because of the Spanish group, but haven't participated in most of their other activities. All of the ladies I have met in IWAH are nice but they are mostly a lot older and do things like play bridge and have going out to lunch clubs. Of course, I have a few friends that like to go out to lunch too... but they are my age.

Anyway, Anne who is a German woman from the Spanish conversation group asked me last time if I would like to do a Tandem with a friend of hers named Helga. A tandem is when two people who are learning each other's languages get together to practice conversation. Anne explained to me that Helga was trying to improve her English and would be willing to help me learn German. I figured that someone with a name like Helga would definitely be able to teach me something.

I know it's a stereotype, but when I imagined someone named Helga, I thought she would look like this:

                                or maybe like this:








After we talked (in English, mostly) and made a plan to meet at her apartment, I discovered that Helga looks more like this:

 Ok, so she's not Diane Keaton. She is however, very classy and interesting and patient. She used to be a French teacher and speaks French, Spanish, German, and English. She claims that the English is not good because she's out of practice, and that's why she wanted to do the tandem. Her English is a lot better than my German, but I am happy to help her practice and she seems excited about making a project out of me.

When we met I showed her on the map where I lived in the US and told her about my job and my family and why I am here and what the international school is like... I had no idea I could converse in German for an hour. Then we talked for an hour in English about her. And I learned that she likes tennis and yoga and theater and movies and has a lot of friends, but her husband just likes to watch TV and putter around the house. For that reason he lives in his parents' old house about 40 minutes away and she lives in the city apartment. It got pretty personal for our first session, especially because I get the impression that Germans don't gush about their very personal issues much, but I didn't mind.  When neither of us knew the right word we would try it in Spanish.

So I am meeting again with Helga next week. I will bring some books and photos to talk about. Helga's motivation is that most of the IWAH meetings and activities happen in English and she wants to be able to participate more. My motivation is that I just moved to a foreign country where neither I nor my husband speak the language. Yikes. It sounds scary when you put it that way. But as long as I am trying I might as well get all the practice I can, and sip tea in Helga's beautiful apartment. It beats learning to pronounce German words as if I were from Vietnam.